On Teaching Seniors, Part 2

It’s the height of summer, and that means morning and evening tours of my garden, biking whenever possible, and thinking about how to improve my teaching. The garden’s fine: tomatoes coming along nicely after a poor attempt at trenching, peppers growing at an alarming rate, cukes finally starting to climb the trellis. The biking, too, is progressing: I’m in the Tour de Wyoming this summer and on Saturday, a friend and I biked from town up to Frye Lake. That’s literally uphill for 16 miles and 3,000 feet of elevation.

The thinking about teaching bit? Yeah. That’s complicated.

I’ll start by saying that all the systemic reform in the world doesn’t matter if the teacher isn’t willing to change. For intensely reflective people like me, change isn’t a problem. Teaching is either the ideal career for perfectionists, or it’s a nightmare. Teaching forces you to be creative and constantly reinvent your art, but that means you never get it exactly right.

And the kicker is that you never will get it exactly right. You reach 100+ students in a year, and there’s simply no way your class will live up to every student’s expectations. This is especially true in AP.

And here we delve into some sensitive stuff.

For some reason, and I don’t know why this is so, I’m particularly irritated by know-it-alls. Oh, I have some ideas about why intellectual snobbery sends my Rage-O-Meter up a few tics, but I’ve been thinking about this since my undergrad days at Illinois, 16 years ago now, when fellow students literally peered over their John Lennon specs at me in literature classes, parroting some crap they’d read elsewhere but not actually thinking about the text in question. So far the only conclusion I’ve arrived at is that pretense is, at its core, an expression of power. Some people feel better when they demonstrate that they’re smarter than the other people in the room. Why people choose to express power in this way is beyond me, and I’ve met plenty of folks who most certainly are smarter than other people in the room but don’t use their intellect as an instrument of power. My friend Chris comes to mind, as does my father-in-law.

Advanced Placement classes draw the know-it-alls. The vast majority of students aren’t like this, and some graduating classes don’t have any. I’d put them at about 1% of the population. However, if they exist anywhere, you’ll find them in AP. 

The course evaluations for my AP classes arrived yesterday, and some of the comments were particularly snotty. Now, the structure of the evaluation required students to provide specific feedback about how to improve the class, and some of those ideas were valid and truly helpful. Some of it I saw coming from miles – or in this case, months – away. Clearly, my students want me to lay off the netbooks, and I couldn’t blame them one little bit, although I maintain that everyone’s attitudes toward the paperless classroom would change for the better if we’d been on Macbooks instead of $300 netbooks. But I digress.

The overwhelming feedback on the evaluations was positive, and of course that made me feel good. But lordy, I can’t let go of the small percentage of snotty comments.

I wonder if this has to do with students being told all their lives that they’re awesome, that their writing is wonderful, that they’re brilliant at everything they do. I wonder too how much of this is on me, how much on the student, how much on systemic flaws in public education, how much on home cultures that privilege being smarter than everyone else; that enable snobbery. (For what it’s worth, this article addresses these points in ways that I’ve suspected but couldn’t put into words.)

Biking to the hardware store yesterday, I realized a little perspective was in order. Children are parents’ most valuable possession. Of course parents want their kids to receive the best education possible, and of course it’s incumbent upon me to ensure that happens. And of course my class evaluations are going to reflect dissatisfaction – no class can be all things to all students, remember, and let’s not forget that we’re dealing with young adults here. Their brains have literally not yet fully formed. I’ve come to realize that teens take their shots where they can get ‘em. Course evaluations are the equivalent of open season permits.

And that, I think, is why teaching seniors is such a challenge. They don’t know what they don’t know; they’re forced into significant decisions at a young age; they’ve been led to believe that education is a product rather than a practice. And what do consumers do when a product doesn’t live up to expectations? They complain.

Seniors, then, need reassurance, guidance, and support. I make no apologies for taking class time to discuss those anxieties that manifest in strange ways in October or so, when friendships fray and students frequently burst into tears during one-on-one conferences in the hall. Sure, we’ll talk about their APA research papers, but we’ll also talk about why the college application process is so stressful. I firmly believe that everything that happens in a high school building is curriculum, and I therefore try hard to keep my politics and religion out of my teaching, but I think discussing the realities of life after high school is entirely valid. Yes, sometimes I give college advice ad nauseum and bore some kids to tears. But as long as I’m teaching seniors, I’m going to provide them with a framework for dealing with What Happens Next. If some students would rather discuss courtly romance etiquette and thus demonstrate their awesome Renaissance knowledge, well, that’s not what the majority of AP students need. Not at this school anyway.

Ultimately, once these seniors leave high school, parents’ and students’ focus shifts away from me and my class anyway. Maybe some know-it-alls will have epiphanies in college that convince them to stop expressing power in hurtful, self-aggrandizing ways. Maybe some will realize that they’ve been transparent all along, revealing insecurity rather than insight.

Or maybe not; maybe they’ll get smoked by professors who simply don’t care about their relationships with students.

Regardless, I’m going to make it a point this year to ask students what they need from AP and LA 12. That’s harder in AP for various reasons, but it is reasonable and feasible. I’m also searching for the magic bullet solution to parent contacts. I hate telephones and suspect that a lot of parents would prefer email anyway. I used to do email updates to parents who’d opted in, so I might tweak that and make them mandatory – let folks just delete the thing.

Meh. There’s a solution here somewhere. Just gotta find it.

It’s a gorgeous morning out here on the porch. Rigby’s curled up on the couch, the cat’s wandering around here someplace, and we’re all catching some lovely breezes. I’m still trying to recover from last night’s show; the band played over in Riverton and we didn’t get home until 12:30. Our trombone player is leaving, which is a bummer, and last night was his farewell gig. As for whether or not teachers should be in bars playing funk music, well, that’s for another post.

Onward.